The NW-9 disk image was released in late July, 2003. It has been in use on netwinder.org since mid August. It features a 2.4 kernel with iptables and glibc-2.3, and a gcc-3.3 toolchain.
The image can be downloaded from our ftp site or preferably one of the mirrors. This is a base image that has a shell, network connectivity, and can do basic email/web browsing. There is experimental support for yum which works like apt-get to install packages and keep your system up-to-date.
There is no "full" install image for nw-9 simply because of size and lack of testing. All of the RPMs installed, without any documentation, is over 800MB compressed, and nearly 3GB uncompressed. So we just made the base image, and you can install the pieces you need. Check out the "yum" link above.
Mark Lord has made a "fuller" image based on nw-9. He rebuilt the kernel, added Xfree (from Debian) and got KDE running. See his announcement. The image is available here.
The default password is "vnc" just like the old DM images. It stands for "Video Network Computer", which was the original name of NetWinder product (a successor to the Corel Video Console).
Known problems with the nw-9 developer image at this time include:
The base image is missing man program for reading man pages. The pages themselves are there, but you have to install man and groff in order to be able to read them.
The nwconfig program hasn't been included. However the standard RedHat netconfig does the job.
Phantom partition shows up: sometimes an extra partition will appear, only one block long, after your real partitions. This shows up when you run fdisk, typically with a warning that a partition "does not end on cylinder boundary". We haven't determined the root cause.
Don't download the XFree86 server package, it is broken, will only segfault and die. Some necessary cache-flushing code got omitted. We hope it will be fixed in a future (Fedora) version. Mark Lord reported some luck using the XFree server (just the one binary) from Debian.
We are missing "netwinder" utilities like set_therm, flashwrite, etc.
The commands ps -f and ps -l cause segmention faults. This hasn't been looked into, hopefully just a minor bug though.
See some additional items on the nw-9 status page.
Please send feedback to the devel mailing list.